Richard M. Nixon - Domestic policies

Nixon refused to follow the Eisenhower pattern of consolidating Democratic
programs and attempting to run them more efficiently. He was prepared to
make major departures, in part to conciliate the South on race; in part to
build a new coalition with policies on aid to parochial schools,
opposition to abortion, and support for school prayer, all of which would
appeal to Roman Catholics; and in part to appeal to his traditional
Republican constituencies with attacks on President Lyndon
Johnson's Great Society welfare policies.

Race was the most important domestic issue. The Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare (HEW) stalled on implementing desegregation of
southern school districts until prodded by federal court orders. By 1970
the administration had bowed to the inevitable, with Nixon setting the
tone by declaring that legal segregation was inadmissible; almost all of
the all-black southern schools were merged into unitary school districts
by 1970, and less than 10 percent of black school-children attended
all-black schools by that time, a major advance from the preceding
administration.

The president remained strongly opposed to court-ordered busing and came
out for the concept of the neighborhood school. He proposed that Congress
ban court-ordered busing, ordered the Justice Department to oppose busing
orders in pending lawsuits, and called for a $1.5 billion program of new
federal aid for school districts in the process of dismantling their
segregated facilities. These proposals bogged down in Congress, which did
pass several measures, sponsored by southern Democrats, to end the use of
federal funds for busing.

Nixon's proposed amendments to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, up
for renewal in 1970, were tilted toward the South. The president proposed
that its provisions be extended to all states so as not to
"discriminate" against one region and that voting-rights
lawsuits be tried first in state courts, a change that would have
diminished the prospects of effective enforcement of the law. A group of
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee scuttled the Nixon draft, and
a bipartisan coalition substituted its own extension of the bill, which
also included provisions for granting the vote to eighteen-year-olds.

An unusual departure for the Nixon administration was the plan developed
by Secretary of Labor George Shultz to provide training and employment
openings for minorities on federally funded construction projects. The
government, especially Labor Department and HEW officials, began using
racial classifications and numerical goals in implementing their
desegregation programs—the first example of "affirmative
action."

Law and order was another administration priority. Antiwar and civil
rights demonstrations and civil disturbances on the campuses and streets
created a backlash among the constituencies Nixon was courting. With
children of the post-World War II baby boom coming of age, the crime rates
soared. The administration responded with the vigorous use of four
measures: the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act (1968), the
Organized Crime Control Act, the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and
Control Act (1970), and the District of Columbia Criminal Procedures Act.
Provisions emphasized wiretapping, preventive detention, and other
measures that aroused the opposition of civil libertarians. No appreciable
dent was made in the crime rate, which was the province of local law
enforcement, and a war on illegal drugs also had little success.

Other Nixon initiatives involved attacks on several of the most visible
Great Society programs, which Republicans had strongly opposed. In January
1975, Nixon eliminated the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the
coordinating agency for the so-called War on Poverty, begun in 1964. The
controversial Community Action Program was reorganized, other OEO programs
were moved to other departments, and funding for some activities was cut.

The Nixon administration had its own proposals to fight poverty. It
rejected two approaches that were being considered at the end of the
Johnson administration—nationalizing the existing welfare program
or instituting a guaranteed minimum income through a negative income
tax—and instead proposed a program of family allowances developed
by the Urban Affairs Council under the direction of Daniel Moynihan. The
program was eventually defeated in the Senate in 1970 by an unlikely
coalition of conservatives and liberals. The administration did succeed in
passing a welfare reform measure that gave the national government
complete control over welfare programs for the aged, blind, and disabled,
and that provided more than $2 billion in additional payments in the
welfare programs annually.

Because Nixon was pragmatic in domestic matters, he could be persuaded or
pressured into new initiatives. Bar associations, acting in concert to
salvage the Legal Services Program from the wreckage of the Great Society,
managed in 1972 to get Nixon to lift his veto threat against legislation
converting the Legal Services Program into the Legal Services Corporation
with a larger budget and an autonomous board of directors, in spite of
Nixon's initial decision to curtail the program severely to please
his conservative supporters. The Food Stamp Act of 1964 was greatly
expanded to provide billions of dollars of purchasing power to the
nation's needy, through the efforts of Senator Robert Dole,
Republican of Kansas, and a coalition of farm-state senators and urban
liberals. Nixon proposed the New Federalism program in response to the
pleas of governors and mayors, hard hit by demands for new services and
revenue shortfalls caused by recession. Various narrow categorical grants
were consolidated into "block grants" to give states more
flexibility in programming funds, although by the time Congress finished
with the Nixon proposals, the new grants looked suspiciously like the
older narrow grants. Congress also passed a Nixon initiative to provide
the states and cities with $30 billion in federal revenues over a
five-year period. Responding to the demands of environmentalists, Nixon
proposed legislation that led to the creation of the Council on
Environmental Quality (1969), the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (1970), and the Environmental Protection Agency (1970). New
laws provided tougher standards for water and air quality.

Nixon's domestic record was neither liberal nor conservative, but
politically pragmatic. His civil rights policies, judicial appointments,
and unsuccessful attempts to appoint southerners to the Supreme Court all
represented political payoffs to the South. Nominees Clement Haynsworth
and G. Harrold Carswell were blocked by a coalition of legislators
sensitive to charges by civil rights organizations that these men, while
on the federal bench, had either demonstrated opposition to Supreme Court
case law protecting the rights of blacks or demonstrated incompetence in
applying the law. In spite of well-publicized attacks on some Great
Society programs, transfer payments to the poor, the sick, and the elderly
increased greatly. Federal expenditures for intergovernmental grants
soared. Early in the Nixon presidency, Attorney General John Mitchell,
meeting with a group of civil rights leaders, suggested that they
"watch what we do, not what we say" in judging the
performance of the administration. By that standard, the Nixon presidency
must be adjudged innovative and responsive in practice, although it seemed
conservative and uncaring in its rhetoric.

No mention here about Nixon's use of wage and price controls to combat inflation. Nixon abandoned what was left of the gold standard, essentially allowing future Federal Reserve Boards to print as much money as they desired, with no requirement for that money to be backed with gold or silver.

In addition to the EPA, Nixon also started OSHA. Neither Nixon or congress bothered with the question of whether clean air or workplace safety were issues that the federal government, under the constitution, was allowed to legislate. (Hint: every state in the nation has its own version of an Environmental Protection Agency.)

I'm not sure Nixon was terribly sympathetic with any liberal progressive agenda. In most of his first term, Nixon focused his attention almost entirely on foreign policy, particularly Indochina. His chief of staff H.R. Haldeman for example, explained that the president had "not much interest in domestic affairs as the whole focus is on the war." On many occasions Nixon didn't even bother to read briefs from his aides on the environment, education, civil rights, or economics. During the Cambodian crisis of 1970, domestic affairs were delegated to his comparatively progressive key adviser, John Ehrlichman. That the domestic record of the Nixon administration looks liberal is an aimless consequence of both his hands-off approach to domestic affairs and the stewardship of Ehrlichman. (Melvin Small, "At the Waters Edge: American Politics and the Vietnam War", Ivan R. Dee, 2006, pg. 131)

I would be remiss not to mention that on February 17, 1971 at 5:23pm, Ehrlichman relayed to Nixon his meeting with Edgar Kaiser over his private enterprise solution to health care which Nixon said, "appeals to me." Ehrlichman explained to his boss that Kaiser was able to run a for profit health care system since "all the incentives were toward less medical care because the less care they give them, the more money they make" to which Nixon replied, "Not bad." The very next day Nixon went in front of the American public advocating "a new national health strategy" since he wanted "America to have the finest health care in the world" and for "every American to have that care when he needs it." Thus the birth of the HMO. Nixon a "great man"? That doesn't even pass the laugh test.

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